Theia vs Hyperion?

Theia is a patch player for Hyperion presets - it’s been designed to provide the simplest possible to use interface for users who just want to play ready made sounds, providing access to a curated set of Hyperion patches with pre-assigned Macro sound parameters and basic layer controls.

Hyperion includes the full modular patching editor that was used to build all the patches included in the Theia factory set - it’s extremely flexible and powerful, yet might not be suitable for everybody - hence Theia was created.

Hyperion users effectively already have Theia built into Hyperion (including the Theia patch set, but also many more patches), however if Hyperion license holders would like to use the simplified interface of Theia they will automatically get a license for Theia.

Theia users who would like to upgrade to Hyperion to enable full patch editing and the creation of new presets can cross-grade to Hyperion with a 50% discount.

Current patch management situation:

Hyperion users with the latest build have the same factory patch set as Theia + quite a few extra more experimental, generative, fx and init type patches for helping with patch design.

Since Hyperion and Theia are 100% patch compatible, Hyperion users wishing to use Theia to browse and play their Hyperion patch set can just point Theia’s folder browser to their Hyperion patch folder (and vice-versa if you wanted to have Hyperion only browse the curated factory set of Theia) - however, please be aware that Theia’s patch set was designed to be a curated set of sounds, and Theia’s patch browser will not hide ‘Init’, ‘FX’, ‘Generative’, or ‘Control’ type patches, and many of the extra patches in the Hyperion factory set don’t have custom macro assignments or custom image selections.

So, probably the most useful ‘use case’ and reason for using Theia to access your Hyperion patches is to use it for those times you don’t need the full interface of Hyperion - maybe for live performance purposes, in which case you may point Theia to a folder with your own custom selection of patches (currently this requires copying by hand from the patches folder in your system file browser, as there is no ‘export’ option as yet).

Having said all this, since Hyperion includes all the patches provided in Theia, and also includes the same navigation buttons, there is not a huge reason to use Theia instead of Hyperion other than the minor difference in the presentation of the UI (especially the layers editor).

To get the ‘Theia’ experience in Hyperion (being able to randomly browse all sounds including single layer patches or use the previous/next buttons), select the combi layer browser (browser button on the top most layers panel) and mark the ‘include single layer patches’ checkbox, and the ‘hide fx/control/init’ patches checkbox, then select patches using the combi layer browser or the navigation buttons on the combi view/big knobs page (otherwise known as the Theia mode panel):

Hyperion’s combi/big knob page is equivalent to Theia’s main panel - with the same navigation buttons:

In a future release the Theia specific patch set may get tagged with a separate ‘collection’ tag (it would be the same for Theia and Hyperion) to enable to easily filter just those patches within the Hyperion patch browser if it’s pointing at the Hyperion factory patches folder.

Setting the path:

Setting Theia patch browser to use the Hyperion factory presets folder:

Setting the Theia browser to the Hyperion factory presets folder:

Confirming the path - note that in Windows the Hyperion factory patches (“DemoPatches”) folder is in your personal user directory rather than the shared users directory - you still need to click on the actual folder in the folder browser to activate it as the current patch directory:

(A future Hyperion release will move the factory patches to ‘Wavesequencer_Hyperion/Patches/FactoryPatches to be more consistent with Theia and future product releases. At the moment the patch folders are not combined by default to avoid issues mentioned above about loading patches that don’t suit the Theia interface.)